Macadamia association setting sights on ingredients sector

MACADAMIAS are a great snack, but the Australian Macadamia Society want to see them become much more.

With more and more macadamias being grown each year, market development manager Lynne Ziehlke said a focus on marketing the product to food developers is designed to see the macadamia become a staple in the ingredients sector.

65 per cent of the world’s macadamias are sold into the snack market and Ms Ziehlke said increasing usage in the ingredients sector for products such as cereals and ice-creams was vital for the future of the industry.

“We believe we are under-utilising our products in the ingredients sector,” she said. “It’s not that the ingredients sector doesn’t want to use macadamias - there has been a lot of interest in it.”

She said getting macadamias into everyday food items was a way to strengthen the industry for the future, and command demand.

“We want to see ten new products with macadamias in it by 2018,” she said. “This isn’t a ten year goal – it’s happening now.”

Ms Ziehlke said appealing to the millennial generation meant using clever marketing to frame macadamias as a desirable ingredient in foods, and to encourage marketers to boast about their inclusion as an ingredient.

Macadamias have long been used in the beauty industry but Ms Ziehlke said it was only in the past two years that businesses had started boasting about it. “You’re seeing people now actually saying it has macadamia oil in it - it’s not there as a carrier, but as something which adds to their product,” she said.